The concept of remote confinement has attracted a great deal of public interest in recent years as an aid for probation and as an alternative to prison, jail or other institutional confinement for certain classes of criminal offenders. Home incarceration and remote confinement as used herein refer to confinement to one's home or to another location usually remote from a conventional prison or other correctional facility for service of a criminal sentence or probation. The overcrowding of jails and prisons, and the high costs of the construction and operation of prison facilities, have made necessary the search for alternatives to institutional incarceration, particularly for non-violent offenders.
The increase in numbers of the persons convicted of criminal offenses requiring incarceration or supervised probation is due in part to the demand for the imposition of sentences for crimes involving substance abuse. A number of those convicted requiring such sentences are convicted for the offenses involving drug and alcohol usage, and particularly, for the offense of driving under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or other such substances ("DUI").
Until recently, the only practical means for implementing the imposition of incarceration as a penalty for these offenses has been to require confinement in the available jails and prisons. These penal institutions, however, are generally designed to accommodate prisoners convicted of crimes ranging widely from the most violent and most dangerous of offenses to those which, in a relative sense, are committed by those who constitute less of a threat to the public safety. Accordingly, the conditions of incarceration and the facilities necessary to incarcerate persons convicted of different crimes need not conform to the same requirements for all prisoners. For this reason, the concept of home incarceration has been looked to as a useful alternative tool to make criminal confinement for less egregious offenses possible without unduly crowding or otherwise burdening a prison system having facilities designed to accommodate the requirements for housing more dangerous offenders.
In addition, for certain types of offenders, particularly first time offenders, the likelihood of rehabilitation and return to normal life is increased by the use of the home incarceration in lieu of prison confinement. Home incarceration permits offenders to continue the care and support of their families, to maintain employment, and to pay fines and compensate their victims. Home incarceration also is particularly useful in special programs such as early release and work release, for defendants awaiting trial, for release on or in lieu of bond, and in other cases where detention is desirable but less than absolute maximum security is required.
The initial problem confronted in the use of remote confinement is the problem of verifying the presence of the prisoner at the designated confinement location. Continuous human surveillance of a number of geographically dispersed remote confinement locations is not feasible since the manpower involved and its related cost would likely offset or exceed the potential cost savings that remote confinement otherwise offers over the use of prisons. An honor system, even one with periodic checking by corrections officers, would also be costly and would suffer from unacceptable low security in many cases. Some form of involuntary confinement is considered by many to be a minimum requirement for detention which serves a punishment for crime.
A solution to the problem of verifying the presence of the prisoner at the remote confinement location has been developed in the prior art. Systems presently in use employ a bracelet or anklet device locked about the prisoner's neck, wrist or ankle which operates together with a device installed on the prisoner's telephone to verify the prisoner's confinement by telephone surveillance over telephone lines from a central office such as the probation office of the criminal justice facility. Such systems in current use are those manufactured or marketed by BI Incorporated of Boulder, Colorado, by Community Control Corp. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and by Behavioral Systems Southwest, Inc. of Panoma, Calif.
These prior art systems work in two ways. First, they may cause the phone at the prisoner's home to automatically report to a central office whenever the prisoner strays more than a specified distance, usually about 150 feet, from the phone. Second, the system may report the presence or absence of the prisoner upon interrogation by the central office. Some devices include an RF transmitter in a neck band, bracelet or anklet which emits a constant or pulsed signal which is received by a transponder connected to the phone line in the prisoner's home; when the signal sensed by the transponder drops below a predetermined level due to the prisoner's excessive distance from the phone, the transponder dials the central office. With other systems, the transponder is activated when contacted by a phone call from the central office and, at that time, verifies the presence of the prisoner as determined by the presence or absence of a signal from the transmitter. Other systems require a physical contact or the generation of an electronic signal between the bracelet or anklet and the phone set to be initialized by the prisoner in response to a call from the central office. For verification of the presence of the prisoner to occur with such a system, it is necessary for the prisoner to be present within some predetermined radius of the telephone location. Absence of the prisoner from this radius will cause a signal to be received by the corrections office informing it of a violation of the home arrest confinement. Many of such systems have the disadvantage of being capable of circumvention by the generation of false signals from a device other than that which is attached to the prisoner.
It is also known in the prior art to use video cameras to survey over dedicated lines the area of a prisoner's incarceration. Such devices are an extension of the art of electronic visual surveillance employed in the security of industrial, retail and financial establishments as well as in the periphery security of apartment buildings and other commercial and residential facilities. The cameras of these systems are used either on-line or with recording devices. Such systems, when used on-line, require a human attendant to monitor the visual images and to make decisions based on what is viewed. An attendant at the central office is not essential in the prior art systems described previously, however, and such systems would lend themselves more readily to a more automated and less supervised decision making process.
All these prior art systems, however, lack the capability of testing for past compliance of the prisoner with behavioral restrictions such as abstinence from drugs such as alcohol. In addition to verifying the mere presence of the prisoner at the place of confinement, the need for determining the prisoner's compliance with the behavioral conditions is of major importance. The inability of the prior art systems to effectively determine such compliance seriously limits their effectiveness as alternatives to institutional incarceration.
Since a principal need for the remote confinement concept is for the incarceration of abusers of chemical substances such as drugs and alcohol, an important condition of the incarceration is frequently the requirement that the prisoner abstain from the consumption of drugs or alcohol while incarcerated.
Alcohol usage is often of great concern to probation officials. This is due not only to the fact that many of the offenders for which home incarceration is well suited are those having a history of alcohol abuse, but it is also because the home incarceration concept itself results in a state of boredom and inactivity which precipitates alcohol abuse.
Alcohol and drugs are often readily available to the prisoner incarcerated at home. Such being the case, substance abuse is a problem for the entire family as well as the prisoner. The likelihood of domestic violence and erratic behavior is greatly increased by substance abuse. Drinking diminishes the ability of the offender to make rational decisions about complying with judicially imposed conditions so that violence or attempts to flee from the place of confinement as well as other offenses which would not be as likely to occur when the prisoner is sober are liable to be committed when a prisoner is under the influence of alcohol or some other drug.
The prior art systems have lacked the ability to determine the compliance with or violation of conditions or restrictions on the remotely confined person's behavior, including behavior relating the abuse of restricted substances, or to determine conduct such as the use of device for generating false signals to defeat the home incarceration system. These have been among the shortcomings of the prior art.
Accordingly, the absence of an effective means to determine the remotely incarcerated prisoner's behavior in connection with the use of substances such as alcohol and drugs during the course of the incarceration has been a material drawback to the remote incarceration alternatives of the prior art. There exists a need for a remote confinement system overcoming the shortcomings of the prior art discussed above.